Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

But Mira’s mother makes Mira chickpea sandwiches on bread that crumbles when she touches it. Mira’s mother wears orange jumpsuits and culottes, and drops her off and leaves to do errands, floating in at the end of class, smelling fresh and sour, like the ocean and a cloudy day. And instead of a name like a bell or a flower, she named her Mira because it is unusual and different and so now the Puerto Rican girls say Mira Mira, is you red-haired Puerto Rican?

No, she’s just a white girl with a weird mother.

But now it scarcely matters anymore. Mira is eleven and can get herself to class. She travels with her friend Val who lives in her neighborhood but goes to a different school. They meet by the subway, their dance bags full, their hair already bound up in high ponytails, their hairnets and bobby pins in the outer pockets of their bags.

Mira’s mother, in paint-splattered overalls and head kerchief, is conferring with a Selba’s saleslady. The saleslady is rifling through a stack of leotards and her mother is nodding distractedly — Mira can tell she is still thinking about one of her half-finished paintings.

“Better to get them big,” her mother agrees. The saleslady picks up a cap-sleeved leotard that has come loose from its packaging and lies on the bottom of the bin. She brushes off the lint.

“We’re supposed to wear spaghetti strap,” Mira says quickly. “Cap sleeve are for Level One and Two.”

Mira’s mother looks from her eleven-year-old daughter to the wigged saleslady; her forehead pinches together. “Excuse me,” she says to the lady. Then, to Mira, “Outside!” On the sidewalk, they stand in a patch lit by the afternoon sun. The mica in the sidewalk glints all around Mira’s sandals. A fat pigeon with a clubfoot pecks along the curb. Down the narrow street that intersects with this one, Mira can see the tower of a factory spewing smoke into the gray air.

Her mother puts her face right up to Mira’s. But she doesn’t yell. Instead, she leans against the wall and then slides down until she is sitting on the sidewalk. She drops her head in her hands. “Time for a break,” she says. You can hear a bit of her Manhattan voice creeping in, a snipping of the vowels and a hardening of the consonants.

Mira sits down next to her. Her mother digs in her big suede shoulder bag.

“Mom, people are staring.”

“Who are these theoretical people?” Rachel pulls out a bag of crushed nuts and smashed raisins and offers some to Mira. Mira looks down the long, narrow street. In the distance, she can see someone coming.

“Him.” They stare as a man’s form fills out with details. He has greasy hair and wears a plaid jacket. He is walking under a green and red awning. He is smoking a cigarette.

“You think you’ll ever see him again?” her mother says loudly as the man lopes past.

The man steals a glance at her mother, then stops, as if he just remembered something. “Got a light?” he says.

Her mother scrounges around in her bag. Other mothers have purses, her mother has a bag —it is a big suede one made of colorful leather straps. She pulls out a dog-eared book of matches.

“Hey,” he says, looking at the logo of the nightspot on the matchbook cover. “That’s a good place. They’ve got a good piano bar.”

“I know,” she says. She pulls the kerchief off her hair, so that it falls down. It is long, wavy, and very red.

“That’s some hair, lady,” he says.

“Rachel,” Mira says. “Her name’s Rachel.” Her mother lets her call her Rachel sometimes. Sometimes she insists on it. It’s hard to say when she is Mira’s mom and when she is Rachel.

He laughs. “Okay, kid. Okay.” Something bright and bubbling passes between him and her mother. Abruptly, her mother puts the bag of nuts back in her purse and stands up. She shakes her head so that her hair moves over her shoulders. She moves her weight onto one hip. “We have to get on with our shopping mission.”

He begins to move away. With a few furtive looks back, he moves into the shadow of the next building. Then her mother’s hand is on the back of her head, pushing Mira inside. At the counter, her mother mumbles something. An emergency. . tow to the Bowery. . Can you watch her for twenty minutes or so? The ladies seem to understand something in her voice. Not quite her Manhattan voice. Not quite her Brooklyn voice. Something low and rolling behind the high, strained notes. The shop lady nods. As Mira climbs up on a rickety stool the shop lady has gestured toward, she knows there is no emergency. They took the subway here. Rachel’s eyes brush over Mira with an unseeing look, and, cheeks blazing, she exits.

Mira sees through her sideways vision the man’s plaid coat disappear and she feels the rise of the familiar loneliness of waiting, while the city rushes, clocks, and clatters all around her.

Ever since she was little, Mira remembers the feeling: her mother would be there, and then suddenly not. Mom, she would call. And then her mom would appear from another part of the house, or another part of a store, or even where she had vanished moments before from a crowded sidewalk.

Her mother always comes back from wherever she goes, her voice, no longer fraught and high, but low and Brooklyn, full of salt and tide. Mira’s job is just to wait.

On the subway ride home, amid the rhythmic clatter of the train, Mira looks up at her mother. “Do you and Dad love each other?” she asks.

Her mother looks at her daughter, her daughter who, to her secret pride, is another version of her. Pale skin, freckles, hair the color of carrots simmered too long in broth.

“Of course.”

“What’s the difference between being in love and loving each other?” Mira’s voice is becoming higher, more anxious.

Her mother sighs. “Being in love is like falling off a cliff. Being in love is like flying — or falling. All you feel is the wind around you.” She adds: “Loving someone is something you can feel along with lots of other feelings.”

“Can you hate and love someone at the same time?”

“Well, yes, I think you can. Yeah, I definitely think you can.”

“Do you sometimes hate Dad?”

“Of course not. Why would you ask that?”

The train clatters and bangs in the tunnel under the water toward Brooklyn. When the train squeals into their station, they gather their bags and get off.

They turn down Clark Street. They pass stores whose front windows are still shattered. Tape covers the web of cracks at the florist shop. A board covers the front of the shoe repair shop. A lightning strike to a power generator, they said. Act of god, they called it. But the fires and broken windows were not caused by god.

They pass in front of the giant old hotel where old men gather pushing shopping carts stuffed with their belongings. Her father tells her to ignore these men, they are tenants who in time will be replaced , but her mother always greets them. “Evening, captains,” she says in her Brooklyn voice. The men show grins of missing teeth.

A cool gust of wind blows in from the harbor. It is a clear evening, with darkness spreading across the sky.

“I hope Dad is home,” Mira says. The shreds of a sunset hang over lower Manhattan, behind the lit-up jigsaw of buildings. An eerie silence comes over the city, as if it remembers how it is to be naked in the night.

But her father is not home.

“Maybe he’s just late,” says her mother, but her voice is low and unsure. Her Brooklyn voice. When Mira goes upstairs, she finds her father’s dresser top cleaned of cuff links and his closet empty of suits.